Lasting impressions

Daniel Meehan

Daniel Meehan, a young U.S. Merchant Marine who hailed from Staten Island, would be forever marked by the scenes that greeted him in 1948 as he sailed into the Mediterranean and saw a land and its people devastated by the war.

"There were no two levels, everyone was on the same one, and that was nothing," he says. "And then in East Africa when I saw the culture there living ‘without’ — it was impressive to an 18-year-old."

But it was more than three decades later before the Fox Point resident would put those early impressions into action. "For years I was focused on feeding and raising my family, focused on my job," says Meehan, who started his career in port management in 1956 and has five children. "But always buried in my heart is what I discovered at 18, that there are vast inequities in the world."

Meehan joined Milwaukee-based Hansen Storage Co. in 1962 and took the company over when his former boss, Ted Hansen, retired in 1978. He expanded the company into numerous cities including Duluth, Minn., Richmond, Va., and Tampa, Fla. Five years after taking the helm, Meehan formed a nonprofit organization, to award college scholarships to the children of his employees. Meehan’s philanthropic efforts expanded significantly in 1996 after he was approached to sell the warehousing company.

"We weren’t planning on it, but it came and all of a sudden we found ourselves with more money than we wanted or needed," he says.

Meehan and Eileen Meehan, his wife of 54 years, formed the Meehan Family Foundation after selling the company. Within a week of finalizing the sale, the foundation pledged $1 million for the St. Ann Center, an intergenerational day care facility in Milwaukee. Since then the foundation has donated money to help build schools, medical clinics and other facilities that provide care for the neediest population in 13 countries, including the Philippines, Mexico, Tanzania and Kenya. In all, it has given $13 million and 54 scholarships.

Meehan says they have directed much of the foundation’s money to international projects, although programs here in the United States also have received funds.

The foundation, which is run entirely by volunteers, picks who and where to give only after someone, typically Meehan himself, visits the area and reviews the program. "In the U.S., the most natural direction to take is to give to your own, you know, give to people here," Meehan says. "But we found that poverty in our community was unlike the poverty level in other countries."

The Meehans were particularly influenced by a 1993 trip to a girls’ school in Mexico City that educated 4,000 of the area’s poorest teenagers.

"When I saw the happiness of those children, to see them in an environment of love, respect and cleanliness," he says. "And when I saw what one person could do — I can tell you it left an impression." Three years later when the foundation was formed Meehan remembered what he saw in Mexico and directed his efforts internationally.

Meehan sits on numerous philanthropic boards, including the Holy Family Hospital in Bethlehem and a maternity hospital in Palestine. He also is an active member of the Order of Malta, a Catholic lay order that focuses on humanitarian assistance and sits on its international committee. Meehan has received honors over the years, including The Republic of Georgia’s Order of Honor for his donation to build a family medical clinic and training center there. Meehan uses his experience in warehousing and shipping to get food and medical supplies to those in need. He also helps other organizations and churches get their own overseas donations to the right place.

"You know you can never solve their problems," he says. "But you can give them hope."

Diffusing the spotlight

Jef Butterfield

Jef Butterfield is not a limelight type of guy. The Mequon resident would prefer to sidestep any honors and accolades for his contributions to the Milwaukee Rescue Mission.

As he puts it, "I’m only one of many." And that’s true.

The 115-year-old Milwaukee Rescue Mission, the largest homeless shelter in the state, provides food, clothing and housing for an average of 300 men, women and children every night. In one year, the nonprofit’s $7.5 million budget will be used to serve 250,000 meals as well as run several programs focused on piecing back together the lives of those who seek their help. The rescue mission, headed by Executive Director Pat Vanderburgh, relies heavily on donations and help from volunteers to effectively serve Milwaukee’s homeless population.

Butterfield, 59, is certainly not the only one who has given time and money to the mission. What sets Butterfield and his family apart from much of the pack is the 18 years they’ve been doing it.

Butterfield had never really volunteered before, but 18 years ago he found himself in one of those parental teaching moments. He and his wife, Cecilia, had just moved the family from Atlanta. His two children, Ashley, then in ninth grade and Frank, who was starting seventh, weren’t exactly bursting with enthusiasm over the move.

"I saw an ad in the paper promoting serving Thanksgiving dinner and I thought we don’t really have any plans," Butterfield says. "I thought I could show my kids that there are a lot of other people out there who have it far rougher than they ever will."

The lesson worked better than Butterfield anticipated, he says. And the following year, his children were the ones who brought it up. The family has been serving meals at Thanksgiving ever since. And while Frank is now living in Atlanta and Ashley and her husband, Christian Peters, are living in Birmingham, Ala., the children still serve Thanksgiving dinner every year they come home. In the few years the family has not been in the Milwaukee area for Thanksgiving they have made a point to serve meals at Christmas.

"I’m not sure we would have done this had we stayed in Atlanta," Butterfield admits. "We had our traditions there, we had family there and we would have probably stuck to that. But when we moved up here we had no traditions and after that first year the kids really drove the whole thing."

Both of his children volunteered at the rescue mission to fulfill service requirements at their high schools. The family also has donated money, although Butterfield was quick to point out that "lots of people give much more than we do."

Last year Butterfield received on Ovation Award for Corporate Support from the CG Schmidt Co. after he donated $5,000 to the Milwaukee Rescue Mission in a matching fund drive.

Butterfield, president of Gossen Corp., a Glendale-based moldings company, also has worked to hire graduates from LifeSkills, an intensive 18-month program at the rescue mission that provides transitional housing, drug and alcohol abuse counseling and teaches job skills.

Despite his efforts, Butterfield stresses the work of others.

"What they do every day is inspirational," he says. "How the people in the rescue mission are pulling their lives together is nothing short of a miracle."

Ride of his life

John Gilbert

It took a 30-minute, 35-degree brush with death for doctors to discover what was trying to kill Ian Gilbert.

Just after 6 p.m. Dec. 12, 2000, John Gilbert pulled into the driveway of his Whitefish Bay home to find the police waiting. It was the moment all parents dread, he thought, as the police told him Ian, his eighth-grade son, had fallen through the ice in Lake Michigan.

When Gilbert arrived at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin he found Ian wrapped in blankets and seemingly no worse for wear. As a precaution, doctors took some X-rays and later a CAT scan. And then, as Gilbert puts it, "They looked a little grim, but still weren’t saying much." It wasn’t until they wheeled him into the oncology unit that Gilbert realized what was going on.

What the doctors discovered and officially diagnosed Ian with on Jan. 2, 2001, was stage three non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which included a tumor the size of an eggplant in his chest.

After six months of outpatient chemotherapy, doctors harvested Ian’s stem cells in preparation for more aggressive treatment. That November he was admitted to Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin where he endured chemo blasts, an intensive treatment that also kills off a patient’s bone marrow. They followed that up with 17 days of radiation.

Prior to the diagnosis and through the treatment, Gilbert, 46, had led a relatively sedentary life, and by 2000 was close to 230 pounds. But during his son’s extended hospital stay he began reading Lance Armstrong’s book, "It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life," which chronicled the seven-time Tour de France champion’s battle with cancer.

Gilbert wasn’t a cyclist. But "I did get kind of fired up," he says. And when a couple of women from the Midwest Athletes Against Childhood Cancer Fund noticed he was reading the book during one of their regular hospital visits, they mentioned the Trek 100 fundraiser.

Gilbert borrowed a bike and started raising money. By the June ride, he had trained and collected $7,000. He still suffered on the ride, but his fundraising efforts were rewarded with a new bike from its sponsor Trek Bicycle Corp.

But Gilbert stops short of taking too much credit for the thousands he has raised through the years.

"Listen, I had a compelling story to tell people," he says. "It was a lot easier for me to raise money when people knew or heard that my son had cancer."

What has happened since falls into that "life-changing, miracle" territory. In May, Ian, who is now a junior at the University of Minnesota, celebrated five years of cancer remission. And Gilbert, who continues to raise money for the MACC fund and began riding a little more every summer, is now a 185-pound cycling machine. Today, he rides nearly every day until the Wisconsin winter takes over. That’s when he moves inside to the spinning studio where he teaches a class at Le Club Sports Club, Glendale.

Every year he participates in the MACC fund ride as well as others, including Riding for Research, a spinning endurance event that brought in $100,000 for cancer research last February. This year during the Trek 100 Century Club, a special event for members who raise $1,000 by May 11, Gilbert got the treat of a lifetime when Lance Armstrong was its guest speaker.

Gilbert took his passion for cycling to the next level this summer when he qualified and raced for the Cafe Hollander Cycling Squad, where most of the team is half his age. "If I wanted to help my kid I thought I had better get into good physical health," Gilbert says. Despite raising thousands of dollars for cancer research and turning his own health around through cycling, it was Ian that changed his life, Gilbert says. "He never looked at his situation in a negative way and I learned that you never say, ‘I’m doomed.’ He has taught me a lot about life."